In Haiti, more than half of the population of Haiti face hunger while 22 percent of children are chronically malnourished. Credit: Valeria Vilardo/IPS

By Tharanga Yakupitiyage
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 23 2019 (IPS)

While news of political scandals and tweets may inundate social media feeds, numerous humanitarian crises have slipped under the radar, leaving victims “suffering in silence.”

In a new report, humanitarian organisation CARE shines a spotlight on global crises that have been neglected—a neglect that has led to dire consequences.

“We see more and more complex and chronic crises competing for public attention,” said CARE International’s Secretary General Caroline Kende-Robb.

“Media coverage has always been a strong driver of funding for crises as well as creating political pressure to protect those in need. With dwindling international coverage, under-reported crises are at a risk of falling completely off the radar,” she added.

In a recent survey by the Aurora Humanitarian Index, 61 percent of respondents from 12 countries said that there were too many humanitarian crises around the world to keep up with. More than half also felt they constantly heard the same stories from the same countries.

Whether the public heard about it or not, over 132 million people worldwide faced hardship as a result of natural disasters and conflict.

Among them were Haitians who have faced a severe food crisis in 2018, yet received the least media attention.

In fact, of the one million online articles monitored between January and November 2018, a little over 500 were about the Caribbean state.

With one of the highest levels of chronic food insecurity in the world, more than half of the population of Haiti face hunger while 22 percent of children are chronically malnourished.

On top of the threat of hurricanes, drought conditions in the Caribbean nation caused reductions in crop production, leaving families without food and thus almost three million people in need of humanitarian assistance.

Marie-Melia Joseph, a mother of eight children, told CARE that all they had was a small family plot and a little money to get food.

“Some days were better than others, but I can’t recall the last decent meal we had,” she said.

According to the 2019 Climate Risk Index, Haiti ranks fourth among countries most affected by extreme weather events. Additionally, a majority of the population live in poverty, earning less than two dollars per day.

In Ethiopia, the escalation of violence forced over one million people to flee their homes, the highest number seen in 2018.

Amreh recounted the evening when she heard gunshots and screams.

“We looked outside and saw people fleeing when we realised something was wrong. My husband went outside to look. That was the last time I saw him,” she told CARE.

“I would give everything to go back to the days when things were normal. I am weak and I depend on help from aid organisations now. I see no future for us,” she added.

After the death of her husband, one of her son’s committed suicide, unable to cope.

In addition to the devastating conflict, drought and food insecurity has also left families struggling to survive.

CARE urged not only international media, but also policy makers and civil society to raise awareness about the many neglected crises around the world in order to help garner funds and aid for those in need.

In 2018, 56 percent of Ethiopia’s humanitarian plan was funded while only 13 percent was funded for Haiti.

“Media outlets, politicians, states and aid agencies need to join forces to find innovative ways to draw public attention to humanitarian needs,” said Kende-Robb.

“Given the challenges the media industry faces with shrinking funds, with coming under attacks that are undermining, and with limited access to some of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, we are all responsible for raising the voices of those affected,” she added.

So extreme are gender inequalities in South Sudan that a young girl is three times more likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth than to reach the eighth grade – the last grade before high school – according to Plan International, one of the oldest and largest children’s development organisations in the world.

A vast majority of South Sudanese girls will have been victims of at least one form of gender-based violence in their young lives, but those living in Eastern Equatoria State face a particularly abhorrent practice which is a tradition among at least five of the state’s 12 tribes – being given away as ‘blood money’.

Dina Disan Olweny, Executive Director of the non-governmental Coalition of State Women’s and Youth Organisations, is one of the rights activists pushing for an end to harmful traditions and injustices facing young girls in South Sudan. Credit: Miriam Gathigah/IPS

“When a person kills another person, the bereaved family expects to be given ‘blood money’ as compensation,” Dina Disan Olweny, Executive Director of the non-governmental Coalition of State Women’s and Youth Organisations, told IPS.

Most tribes demand compensation when a life has been taken in one of the regular conflicts over cattle and pasture, revenge killings and other inter-village conflicts, and although 20 to 30 goats is what many tribes demand in form of compensation, Olweny explained that “most families can either not afford or are unwilling to pay so much, and prefer to give away one of their girls as compensation.”

According to child protection specialist, Shanti Risal Kaphle, “a young girl is taken as a commodity that can be given in lieu of someone’s lost life, or as ‘blood money’, to keep the family and community in peace.”

Kaphle explained that the girl’s life is negotiated “without her information and consent and is subject to violence, abuse and exploitation.”

The practice of girl child compensation has not escaped the eye of the government, which set an estimated 500 dollars as the amount for compensation for a life, but tribe people still prefer to be given a girl, saying that the figure set by the government is too little.“A young girl is taken as a commodity that can be given in lieu of someone’s lost life, or as ‘blood money’, to keep the family and community in peace” – child protection specialist Shanti Risal Kaphle

Experts say that a girl is also preferred as compensation by a bereaved family because she can either be married to one of their own without having to pay a bride price, or she can be married off when she turns 12 and attract a herd of goats.

Many of the girls handed over as compensation are often as young as five years. They are expected to forget their birth families and start afresh, severing all contacts with their natural families once the exchange has been concluded.

At this point their lives can take a dramatic turn for the worse through multiple abuse. These girls may be “subjected to child labour, and to sexual, physical and emotional abuse – to escape this hell, more of them now prefer to commit suicide,” said Olweny.

Residents here say that customary laws which perpetuate and rubber stamp these forms of abuse are seen to play a vital role in conflict resolution because they are considered cheap, accessible and the decisions are made on the basis of customs they are familiar with.

Kaphle said that customary laws and decisions are also perceived as more amicable and less time-consuming.

However, girl child compensation is just one of a multitude of abuses that the girl child in South Sudan faces.

The state of Western Bahr El Ghazal, for example, has a notorious tradition of widow compensation which has seen many young girls denied an opportunity to go to school because they are forced into early marriages.

Linda Ferdinand Hussein, Executive Director of the non-governmental organization Women’s Organisation for Training and Promotion, explained how this tradition works.

“When a man’s wife dies for whatever reasons, the man can demand to be given back the bride price that he had paid.” This price varies from one family to the next “but most families are unwilling to pay back the bride price so they give the man one of the deceased wife’s younger sisters as compensation.”

Four years after South Sudan won its independence and became the world’s youngest nation, child protection specialists like Hussein are raising the alarm. “Gender-based violence against young girls continues to be perpetrated in a variety of ways in both peacetime and during conflict,” she said.

A report released Jun. 30 by the United Nations Mission in the Republic of South Sudan (UNMISS) revealed that the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) and associated armed groups recently carried out a campaign of violence against the population of South Sudan, which was marked by a “new brutality and intensity” and included the raping and then burning alive of girls inside their homes.

A report released last year by leading humanitarian organisation CARE, titled ‘The Girl Has No Rights’: Gender-Based Violence in South Sudan, highlighted the extreme injustices faced by young girls in the country.

These injustices continue to serve as obstacles towards accessing education and later exploiting the opportunities that life presents for those who have gone through school.

According to Plan International, 7.3 percent of girls are married before they reach the age of 15 years and another 42.2 percent will have been married between the ages of 15 and 18. And, although 37 percent of girls enrol in primary school, only around seven percent complete the curriculum and only two percent of them proceed to secondary school.

Edited by Phil Harris

Almost exactly two years ago, on the morning of Apr. 24, over 3,600 workers – 80 percent of them young women between the ages of 18 and 20 – refused to enter the Rana Plaza garment factory building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, because there were large ominous cracks in the walls. They were beaten with sticks and forced to enter.

Forty-five minutes later, the building collapsed, leaving 1,137 dead and over 2,500 injured – most of them women.

The Rana Plaza collapse is just one of a long series of workplace incidents around the world in which women have paid a high toll.

It is also one of the stories featured in the UN Women report Progress of the World’s Women 2015-2016: Transforming Economies, Realizing Rights, launched on Apr. 27.

All too often women fail to enjoy their rights because they are forced to fit into a ‘man’s world’, a world in which these rights are not at the heart of economies.
Coming 20 years after the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China, which drew up an agenda to advance gender equality, Progress of the World’s Women 2015-2016 notes that while progress has since been made, “in an era of unprecedented global wealth, millions of women are trapped in low paid, poor quality jobs, denied even basic levels of health care, and water and sanitation.”

At the same time, notes the report, financial globalisation, trade liberalisation, the ongoing privatisation of public services and the ever-expanding role of corporate interests in the development process have shifted power relations in ways that undermine the enjoyment of human rights and the building of sustainable livelihoods.

Against this backdrop, all too often women fail to enjoy their rights because they are forced to fit into a ‘man’s world’, a world in which these rights are not at the heart of economies.

What this means in real terms is that, for example, at global level women are paid on average 24 percent less than men, and for women with children the gaps are even wider. Women are clustered into a limited set of under-valued occupations – such as domestic work – and almost half of them are not entitled to the minimum wage.

Even when women succeed in the workplace, they encounter obstacles not generally faced by their male counterparts. For example, in the European Union, 75 percent of women in management and higher professional positions and 61 percent of women in service sector occupations have experienced some form of sexual harassment in the workplace in their lifetimes.

The report makes the link between economic policy-making and human rights, calling for a far-reaching new policy agenda that can transform economies and make women’s rights a reality by moving forward towards “an economy that truly works for women, for the benefit of all.”

The ultimate aim is to create a virtuous cycle through the generation of decent work and gender-responsive social protection and social services, alongside enabling macroeconomic policies that prioritise investment in human beings and the fulfilment of social objectives.

Today, “our public resources are not flowing in the directions where they are most needed: for example, to provide safe water and sanitation, quality health care, and decent child and elderly care services,” says UN Women Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka. “Where there are no public services, the deficit is borne by women and girls.”

According to Mlambo-Ngcuka, “this is a care penalty that unfairly punishes women for stepping in when the State does not provide resources and it affects billions of women the world over. We need policies that make it possible for both women and men to care for their loved ones without having to forego their own economic security and independence,” she added.

The report agrees that paid work can be a foundation for substantive equality for women, but only when it is compatible with women’s and men’s shared responsibility for unpaid care work; when it gives women enough time for leisure and learning; when it provides earnings that are sufficient to maintain an adequate standard of living; and when women are treated with respect and dignity at work.

Yet, this type of employment remains scarce, and economic policies in all regions are struggling to generate enough decent jobs for those who need them. On top of that, the range of opportunities available to women is limited by pervasive gender stereotypes and discriminatory practices within both households and labour markets. As a result, the vast majority of women still work in insecure, informal employment.

The reality is that women also still carry the burden of unpaid work in the home, which has been aggravated in recent years by austerity policies and cut-backs. To build more equitable and sustainable economies which work for both women and men, warns the report, “more of the same will not do.”

At a time when the global community is defining the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for the post-2015 era, the message from UN Women is that economic and social policies can contribute to the creation of stronger economies, and to more sustainable and more gender-equal societies, provided that they are designed and implemented with women’s rights at their centre.

Edited by Phil Harris    

Even as aid workers are warning that children in South Sudan are falling victim to mass malnutrition, international agencies are said to be missing their fundraising goals to avert a looming famine in the country.

On Monday, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), the international medical relief organisation, reported that nearly three-quarters of the more than 18,000 patients admitted to the agency’s feeding programmes in South Sudan have been children. South Sudan has experienced mounting civil violence in recent months, which humanitarian groups warn has directly impacted farmers’ ability to plant and grow crops.

A child snacks in her family’s new shelter, at Protection of Civilians (POC) camp III, near UN House, in Juba. Credit: UN Photo/JC McIlwaine

Yet even as South Sudan’s malnutrition epidemic intensifies, seven major international aid agencies, all of which prioritise food security in South Sudanese villages, may have to shut down their projects due to severe funding gaps.

Naming South Sudan to be “the most pressing humanitarian crisis in Africa,” CARE International, a U.S.-based relief agency, has stated that the United Nations’ most recent appeal for South Sudan is less than half funded.

The U.N. says some 1.8 billion dollars is urgently needed in the country, yet CARE says that seven implementing agencies are short by some 89 million dollars.

“We will be staring into the abyss and failing to avert a famine if funds do not start arriving soon,” Mark Goldring, chief executive of Oxfam, said in CARE’s report.

“This is a not a crisis caused by drought or flood. It is a political crisis turned violent. The people of South Sudan can only put their lives back together once the fighting ends. In the meantime… we are asking the public to help us with our urgent humanitarian work, but mainly we are calling on governments to fund the aid effort before it is too late.”

On Thursday, the U.S. Department of State announced it would provide another 22 million dollars in humanitarian assistance to facilitate “basic life support” in South Sudan. Yet the following day, three U.S. lawmakers wrote a letter to President Barack Obama, expressing “grave concern” over the growing conflict in South Sudan’s border region and urging “renewed diplomatic engagement” with the international community.

While solving the political problem at the root of South Sudan’s current violence is a significant priority, aid workers say the international community’s most dire concern should be for the nutritional needs of South Sudanese children.

“Many of these children have walked for days to receive medical care and food security, and these are only the ones we see,” Sandra Bulling, media coordinator for CARE International, told IPS from South Sudan. “We don’t even know about the ones hiding in the bush.”

Centrality of nutrition

The malnutrition crisis comes amidst tumultuous domestic politics in South Sudan, resulting in fighting that has raged since December. Some 1.5 million South Sudanese residents are now estimated to be displaced within the country, thereby decreasing their access to reliable food sources and requiring them to share already-limited supplies.

Dr. Jenny Bell, a medical worker and expert on South Sudan with the University of Calgary in Canada, acknowledges that “the nation’s health situation wasn’t brilliant before December,” but warns that the civil conflict has “compounded” the country’s medical issues.

South Sudan “already had the world’s highest maternal mortality rate, and it had been estimated that one in five South Sudanese children die before they reach age five,” she told IPS.

“But even though there had barely been enough food before, now there really won’t be enough, as [internally displaced] farmers were unable to grow crops [due to the violence], and cannot do so now because South Sudan is well into [its] rainy season.”

Adequate nutrition needs to be South Sudan’s top priority, Bell emphasises. The three leading causes of death in the country – malaria, diarrhoea and respiratory infections – are much more likely for a person to contract when he or she is malnourished, she notes.

Yet she adds that despite the “amazing agricultural potential” of South Sudan, funding for this purpose has been weak.

“The United States’ monetary aid to the region is complicated because they don’t trust the South Sudanese government,” she says. “Because of this, they’ve shifted everything to humanitarian aid, and all the development efforts have been wiped out.”

In addition to monetary aid for agricultural development, Bell says health-care facilities urgently need both supplies and personnel.

CARE’s Bulling agrees that training medical personnel is of key importance in South Sudan, adding that her focus is to work with local staff but fly in as many experts as possible.

“But it is mainly money that we need, so we can procure medicines and all of the necessary nutritional requirements,” she says.

When asked what it would take for the international community to react to the need for more funding in South Sudan, Bulling cited a technique that she says has historically been effective.

“We need to have photos of children starving and dying before the world reacts to such a disaster,” she says.

“This is what has worked for Somalia … you need these pictures to talk. For South Sudan we do all these press releases and calls to action, but as long as there is no big report with photos to show how bad the situation is, there is no response.”

Yenenesh Yigsaw (right) recovers from her latest reconstructive surgery with other Noma patients at a recuperation centre outside of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital. Credit: Nick Ashdown/IPS

By Nick Ashdown
ADDIS ABABA, Jan 22 2014 (IPS)

It’s hard to tell if Gelegay Tsegaye is smiling, since a flap of skin covers half his mouth, but his eyes crinkle when he talks and his muffled voice rings with an upbeat cadence. He’s sitting in a special ward of the Korean Hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s most modern healthcare facility. 

Gelegay’s affability is notable because of what he’s gone through. The 34-year-old farmer from a village in Ethiopia’s Gojam region is a survivor of Noma, a rare flesh-eating infection that rots away the face.

When he was just two years old, Gelegay noticed black spots forming on his nose, which quickly spread downwards to his mouth. He received rudimentary treatment, but the diseased part of his face fell off.

Noma is only found amongst children (primary incidence is between the ages of one and four) in the poorest regions of the world, such as rural parts of sub-Saharan Africa and India. The World Health Organisation estimates there are 140,000 new cases globally each year.

Noma’s cause is abject poverty. According to the U.S. Government’s Global Hunger and Food Security Initiative, “Ethiopia is among the poorest countries in the world, with a per capita GDP of 471 dollars.” About 29.6 percent of this Horn of Africa’s 90 million people still live below the poverty line.

Noma only occurs in the poorest villages, where adequate healthcare is non-existent. And there are no official figures on the prevalence of the disease in Ethiopia. Malnourished children with a weakened immune system caused by a viral infection such as measles or malaria are prone to Noma when living in conditions of poor hygiene.

The infection can occur when a child living in poverty suffers a cut to the gums. The cut becomes infected and Noma quickly spreads across the face. Within 10 days, 85 percent of its victims are dead.

The survivors may not feel that lucky though, since they’re left with large portions of their face missing. The affliction then becomes social, not medical.

After Gelegay’s face healed, it wasn’t painful, but the disfigurement left him uncomfortable around people. “I used to be very embarrassed to mix with people. They just pushed me away,” he tells IPS.

Here, Noma survivors don’t go to school. They’re usually isolated by their community, their families, or themselves because they don’t feel comfortable around other people.

Yenenesh Yigsaw is a 19-year-old girl from Ethiopia’s Tigray region who also had Noma when she was two.

Yenenesh didn’t realise she was disfigured until she went to school, and soon stopped going.

“It was my decision. I hated being different from all my friends. I always had to walk around with my face covered, and was very embarrassed,” she tells IPS.

Local surgical resident Gersam Abera has never actually worked with or even seen Noma cases before now.

“Usually, they’ll just stay at home. They don’t even seek traditional treatment,” he tells IPS, adding that many people thought of the condition as a punishment from God and not a medical problem.

A few years ago, Gelegay and Yenenesh heard about Facing Africa, a charity group based in the United Kingdom that gives Noma survivors in Ethiopia free reconstructive surgeries.

Fifteen years ago, Englishman Chris Lawrence started the charity so he could help people in a way that he could see with his own eyes.

Lawrence describes his response to seeing Noma for the first time as “sheer anger.”

“Anger that a disease like this, which is caused by malnutrition and extreme poverty, should exist in the twenty-first century,” he tells IPS.

“Noma is not a disease that needs to exist. If it’s caught in the early stages it’s very easily cured.” Simple antibiotics stop the infection dead in its tracks.

“Either they die, or by the time a doctor sees them, half their face is gone,” Lawrence says.

Most people in rural Ethiopia lack local access to antibiotics, and there are no specific government initiatives for tackling Noma.

The infection can only be eliminated by massive upgrades to rural healthcare, sanitation, and nutrition, which can only be done by the government.

However, experts say rural healthcare has significantly improved since the government launched the Health Extension Programme in 2004/2005.

“This programme has massively increased access to the most basic of health services,” Garth Van’t Hul, country director at the charity group CARE Ethiopia, tells IPS. “It was a major contributor in decreasing mortality rates of under-five-year-olds.”

Gelegay has had three procedures to cover up a cavern in his face enveloping his nose and upper mouth, and Yenenesh had two on her cheek.

They both say life has improved since the procedures. Yenenesh has more friends, and people treat her better now.

Gelegay says meeting other patients with Noma has made him feel a lot better.

“At first I was very surprised because I thought I was the only one,” he says.

A rice delivery in Port-au-Prince on Sept. 24, 2013. Credit: HGW/Marc Schindler Saint-Val

By Correspondents
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Oct 10 2013 (Haiti Grassroots Watch)

Haiti has been receiving food aid for half a century – over 1.5 million tonnes from the U.S. alone during the past two decades.

Recently, however, international aid agencies have raised a cry of alarm. Some two-thirds of all Haitians – almost seven million people – are hungry. About 1.5 million of them – twice as many as last year – face “severe” or “acute food insecurity.” Why?“They call the programme ‘Down with Hunger,’ but to me, it’s a ‘Long Live Hunger’ programme.” -- Haitian farmer Vériel Auguste

A new five-part investigative series sheds some light on the issue by considering the structural causes, as well as by taking a look at the inefficiencies and what one government official calls “the perverse effects” of food assistance.

Haiti’s agricultural sector has long languished, ignored by its governments and by foreign donors. Agriculture represents about 25 percent of the country’s GDP, and until recently it employed – directly or indirectly – up to two-thirds of the population.

Yet for several decades there has been little investment. The Ministry of Agriculture usually gets less than five percent of the government’s budget, and until recently, foreign funding for food aid far outstripped – and sometimes more than doubled – funding for agriculture.

In 2009, a mission from U.N. High Level Task Force on the Global Food Security Crisis deplored “the abandon of agricultural sector and of national production for the past three decades” and also criticised the government and various foreign government and non-governmental agencies for “multiple strategies and programs, which are sometimes contradictory” and for the “endless conferences that do not deliver any concrete results.”

Other issues – like the land tenure system, deforestation and other environmental degradation, and lack of adequate seeds, fertiliser and roads – all play a part in declining agricultural output.

But the sector has also had to contend with an influx of more-cheaply produced, and sometimes subsidised, foreign food – especially U.S. rice – beginning in 1995 when the Haitian government slashed tariffs under pressure from Washington and the international financial institutions.

Whereas the country imported less than 20 percent of its food in the early 1980s, Haiti now gets over 55 percent from overseas, mostly the U.S. and the Dominican Republic.

Since the 2010 earthquake, the government and foreign donors have launched programmes aimed at redressing these wrongs. Roads are being built and canals dredged, and various projects aim to help farmers up their productivity.

But in Grande Anse, one of the most verdant and productive provinces, agronomists are worried.

“Grande Anse was the breadbasket for the other provinces,” Vériel Auguste said. “But not any more. We are losing that potential.”

As he stood in his demonstration garden, where he grows root crops, grains and trees in an effort to inspire members of his cooperative, Auguste said that nearby, other gardens sit empty.

“People leave their land,” he said, because of the lack of technical support and because their crops cannot compete with cheaper foreign food. “Not far from here are a series of beautiful fields with good land! They are closed. The people have left.”

Earlier this year and for most of 2012, not far from Auguste’s plot, stores advertised a food aid programme that he and many others say has helped drive people from their land and increase the woes of Haiti’s farmers.

A food aid “test” reviled by farmers

Although it only provided food to 18,000 families in this country of 10 million, a Haitian government-approved CARE programme that delivered “disaster relief” food vouchers offers a glimpse of how food aid can be a double-edged sword.

Funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the “Tikè Manje” (“Food Voucher”) programme distributed vouchers redeemable for mostly U.S. products like rice, oil and beans up through August 2013. It was supposedly meant to assist victims of Hurricane Tomas, which hit farmers’ fields in November 2010.

Instead, it did not start up until 11 months later, and only got into full swing in 2012, one year after the storm hit. It was expanded from 12,000 to almost 18,000 beneficiaries after Hurricane Sandy hit the peninsula.

Asked why it was allowed to start one year after Tomas, when U.S. and Haitian agencies deemed that hunger was abating, the director of the government “Aba Grangou” (“Down With Hunger”) programme admitted that the region had “probably already started to recuperate”.

“But since it had already been set up, the U.S. government decided to implement it,” Director Jean Robert Brutus said.

Haiti’s CARE office gave an additional reason. CARE said the programme was a “test” of a new food voucher system, which uses the Jamaica-based Digicel telephone company to transfer credit to beneficiaries. Digicel and the Haitian government both get paid every time a transfer is made.

The programme “is simply a test in certain regions to see if we can implement the programme everywhere in the country,” coordinator Tamara Shukakidze explained in a March 2013 interview, while the Tikè Manje was still running.

At the time, CARE was hoping to be a contractor for a future USAID-funded 20-million-dollar “social security net” project that would include food vouchers, according to CARE spokesman Pierre Seneq.

Farmers and agronomists like Auguste are still livid over the voucher programme because participants were given U.S. rice and vegetable oil rather than locally produced breadfruit and other traditional foods.

“They call the programme ‘Down with Hunger,’ but to me, it’s a ‘Long Live Hunger’ programme,” Auguste said.

Dejoie Dadignac, coordinator of the Network of Dame Marie Agricultural Producers, said her federation of 26 organisations was shocked.

“At every little store we visit, even ones that used to sell cement or tin sheeting, we see a sign: ‘USAID,’” Dadignac said in a September 2012 interview. “In their radio advertising, they say they are giving people plantains and breadfruit, but that’s not what we see. We see rice, spaghetti, oil, while our products are left out.”

Queried on the issue, CARE spokesman Seneq said future programmes would source local foods and thus “contribute to the economy rather than promote foreign food”.

On Sep. 27, USAID announced that CARE was awarded a contract for a new food voucher programme for 250,000 people. When asked where the vouchers would be distributed, and if the new programme would source U.S. or Haitian food, Seneq promised details but then never fulfilled that pledge.

The new programme is funded in part by a USAID food aid budget, Food For Peace, that requires most of the money be used to purchase and ship U.S. grown- and produced-goods. No other food aid programme in the world has those restrictions.

The current administration proposed changes, but because the 2013 Farm Bill – which covers food aid, farm subsidies and food stamps – has not yet been passed, those changes have not been implemented.

Merilus Derius, 71, said he thinks the younger generations are dissuaded from farming because they lack the means to prevent environmental degradation, but also because of cheaper or free foreign food, which are now more desired than products previous generations ate.

“Before, farmers grew sorghum and ground it. They grew Congo peas, planted potatoes, planted manioc. On a morning like this, a farmer would make his coffee and then – using a thing called ‘top-top,’ a little mill – he would crush sugar cane and boil the sugar cane water, and eat cassava bread, and he would have good health!” he said. “When you lived off your garden, you were independent.”

Read the entire Behind Haiti’s Hunger series and watch two videos, shot mostly in Savanette and on Grande Anse, here.

Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA), community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media and students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti.